Correspondent's Notebook

One year on

5 February 2010

It’s a year since the horror and devastation of the Black Saturday bushfires in country Victoria. Among those who reported on those wrenching events was ABC reporter Michael Vincent, who returned this past week to the town of Kinglake. This is what he found.

“It’ll all be better after February 7. It’ll be history then.” She paused. Tears began to form in her eyes. And she sighed. “Give us a hug dear”.

Carol had helped me after the fires with a smile and cuppa tea. She lost her house, salvaging some old china plates. Close friends of hers died. People with horrific burns were brought to the Country Fire Authority shed where she worked as a volunteer.

In the following days she selflessly worked around the clock, keeping things running for the crews still putting out spot fires.

Seeing me had brought everything back. We only spoke for a few moments before she teared up. We hugged and she left and walked off down the street.

Kinglake is no longer grey and dusty. The inescapable smell of wood smoke is gone and its air is clean and fresh. The trees have fluffy green foliage, but underneath the trunks are still black. Everywhere, everything and everyone is reminder. It has been a year, but the trauma is only so far beneath the surface.

“My son kept asking me: ‘Are we going to die?’” a mother recalled trembling. Sally is now medicated, so is her husband and her daughter. Her son is only eight and so the doctors are trying not to give him pills, yet. At the age of seven he had the responsibility thrust on him of saving his home and his life with a wet towel and a bucket while all around him burned. The next morning, like other children in Kinglake, he learned his best friend had died in the fires. After six months he told his counsellor he doesn’t want to talk any more, it wasn’t helping.

For others that day is what they want to talk about. They need to talk about. They also need to find the right person to listen.

Counselling is available at the local schools, local GP clinic and over the phone.

But then there’s black humour about it all.

Almost every adult seems to be able to recite the stages of grief by rote. “Shock, anger, etc. I’ve been through all seven,” one woman told me. “And that’s just in the last half hour!” She laughed.

And as if modern daily life wasn’t enough to create stress, the triggers for panic attacks, angry outbursts or moments of uncontrolled sobbing are inescapable. Weather events like a strong hot wind, a dust storm, the winter fog or a red sunset. Confined spaces or open ones, the front doorstep. It all depends on where people were when the fire hit; where they felt they were going to die.

And then there are the places of the many dead. The houses, now vacant lots. The bend in the road where the five car wrecks were or where you last saw someone alive.

This is what people in Kinglake live with and live in.

But that doesn’t stop the questions.

“Why don’t you just get over it?” asked one woman of another almost provoking a brawl on a train out of Melbourne. Or the visitors who come into the town, see the greenery and the nice clean prefab buildings and say “what’s so bad about this”. Or yet others who feel enormous empathy with the suffering of Kinglake and yet ask the person serving behind the counter of a local shop “so did you know someone who died?”

Everyone knew someone who died. And today they will gather on the local football oval. Families on picnic rugs. Friends in arms.

They will mourn the dead as the sun sets on the first year since the Black Saturday bushfires claimed 173 lives.